How former Canadien Rod Langway almost became a BruinBack to video

“Back in 1977 there was a big tough mobile defenceman from Randolph Massachusetts, who was a three sport athlete playing for the University of New Hampshire,” Cherry wrote. “Reporters came to me and said, this defenceman wants to play for Boston, he’s a Massachusetts guy and even has the Boston accent, you’ve got to get him. I went to management and said lets take this guy, he’s a quarterback for the football team and he’s big and tough. To make a long story short, we did not draft him.

“We drafted a small goalie that never played for us and only played a few games in the NHL,” Cherry added. “We already had 3 dynamite goalies. Now guess who picked the defenceman right after us? Yup, you guessed it. The Montreal Canadiens couldn’t believe their luck.

“Rod Langway helped the Canadiens win Stanley Cups, he won 2 Norris trophies, he played for team USA 3 times in Canada Cups and he’s a Hall of Famer. Imagine him on the blueline with Brad Park.”

The Canadiens took Langway in the second round (36th overall) of the 1977 NHL draft. The “small goalie” the Bruins took with the 34th overall pick was 5-foot-10, 155-pound Dave Parro of the WHL’s Saskatoon Blades.

Below is a column Red Fisher wrote after Langway was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2002:

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From Taiwan to the Temple

PUBLISHED ON NOV. 5, 2002

RED FISHER MONTREAL GAZETTE

TORONTO — They sat there, these newest Hall of Fame players: Bernie Federko, almost all of his 14 seasons with the St. Louis Blues; Clark Gillies, a mountain of a man on the Mike Bossy-Bryan Trottier line that helped bring four consecutive Stanley Cups to Long Island; coach Roger Neilson, inducted last night as a builder; and Rod Langway, a prize Canadiens catch from the World Hockey Association’s Birmingham Bulls in the 1979 expansion draft.

He is 45 now and last night the Taiwan-born Langway was welcomed into The Game’s temple as a Washington Capital for the very good reason that only the first four of his 15 National Hockey League seasons were with the Canadiens … even though the only Stanley Cup ring he owns is emblazoned with a CH. It was in Washington that he won the Norris Trophy in 1983 and ’84 after landing there along with defenceman Brian Engblom and forwards Doug Jarvis and Craig Laughlin for Ryan Walter and Rick Green. It was there that he served as team captain for 11 years.

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“I’m going in as a Capital,” Langway readily admitted, “and I hope my Canadiens team-mates don’t take it the wrong way. I’m still an alumni of Montreal, but I spent a lot of time in Washington. I was with only three teams: in the WHA, in Montreal for a few years and in Washington for a lot of years after the trade.”

Ah yes, The Trade.

So many years after Canadiens GM Irving Grundman pushed the button on the trade on Sept. 9, 1982, only a few months after a Langway 39-point season and a career-high, remarkable plus-66 in 66 games, it remains fresh in the defenceman’s memory.

It wasn’t personal, it was business.

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Langway ran his hand across his mustache and the tiny tuft of hair under his lower lip when he was asked about it.

“It wasn’t the case that I wanted to leave Montreal,” he said. “I was enjoying it too much. It was all about money, a contract, the exchange rate and my tax situation. I pushed a couple of buttons myself – the wrong way. I started using the press to make it happen faster … to try to make things happen faster … to make a decision.

“It was all about going through a lot of trouble trying to negotiate,” Langway added. “Here I was, an American, trying to get a deal done that would make things more attractive for me. And at the time, Mr. Grundman didn’t want to deal with it. He put a trade together. I don’t have a problem with that. All I wanted to do was to work something out, and two years later, all of a sudden, they figured out a way to make American players happy.

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“That would have been fine with me. If they had been able to do it two years earlier, who knows … I may have finished my career with the Canadiens,” he said with a tight, little smile.

If the Langway trade didn’t make the earth move, it at least caused a small tremor. It was clear that Langway, at least, was someone special, that he had the right stuff to become a presence at his position.

“As it turned out, as much as I didn’t want to leave Montreal, the move was good for me,” he said. “I was put in a different role in Washington. Brian and I were the two top guns. We had to play against the best players.”

Ken Dryden retired after the 1978-79 season, the last of four consecutive Stanley Cups won by the Canadiens. It was Langway’s first, but Dryden remembers him.

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“He was a revelation to me … to a lot of us … in training camp,” Dryden said. “Then, they sent him down to Halifax for a while.”

The 18 games he played with the American Hockey League team was the only time Langway spent in the minors – until after he ended his Hall of Fame career with the Capitals. What followed was an assistant coaching job and some playing time with the Richmond, Va., Renegades, a city in which he still lives and works, as well as time spent with the Providence Reds.

It’s safe to say his post-NHL links with hockey in the East Coast and American leagues didn’t add up to a whole lot of fun for a guy who has two Norris Trophies on his resume; has been named to the first all-star team twice, the second team once and the Canada Cup all-star team; and has played in six all-star games. But he’s at peace with where he is and what he’s doing.

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“Am I happy?” he asked. “Soon, I’ll be married five years. We just had a baby girl, she’s 6 months old. I’m in my second career, really … my second life.”

He still has an eye on getting back to coaching, but he’s happy working in his father-in-law’s business in Richmond.

“It’s a modern-day blacksmith’s shop,” he said. “It’s a mom-and-pop business. Small. Would I like to get back in the coaching business? Yeah, I think it’s still there. But you know as well as I do it’s a pretty close-knit group of guys who get into the NHL. If it happens, it happens,” he said. “Heck, right now … it would be a tough decision if somebody asked me to move on and become a coach.”

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These Hall of Fame ceremonies were special for Langway, Federko, Gillies and Neilson – as they were for former Radio-Canada analyst Gilles Tremblay and Boston Globe columnist Kevin Dupont, who were inducted into the Hall’s media section.

Recalled Gillies: “I was on my way to Moose Jaw for my mother’s 80th birthday. I was at the gate at the airport when I called my office and was told that I had a message to call a Toronto number. That’s when I was told. I sat there and my eyes filled with tears. There was a guy sitting nearby who turned to a friend and said: ‘Man, that guy must have had some bad news!’

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